Vickers Machine Gun
Tactical Analysis * Relic of World War One: The Vickers machine gun dates back to before the First World War. This water cooled machine gun, while old, is still going strong. The Nationalists were sold almost the entire stockpile of these old guns, along with seemingly infinite caches of .303 ammo after the British phased them out. *'Reliable as ever': It may be old, but the Vickers is still a force to be reckoned with. Once set up, a single emplacement can unleash a hellish bulletstorm that suppresses infantry and reduces the performance of vehicles. *'Due for a barrel change': The Vickers, while a capable weapon, is still hopelessly outdated. While very efficient, the cooling system is heavy, and the heavy wheeled base only serves to further increase weight, meaning the gun emplacement has an abysmal top speed. *'Charge breaker': Working disruptor weapons, when they can be recovered, are usually mounted on Vickers defensive emplacements to increase their effectiveness. Such weapons can mow down entire squads of soldiers and reduce lighter vehicles to uselessness without much difficulty. Operational History Before the Bombs Sometime around the beginning of the Chinese Civil War, Britain pledged its support to the National Revolutionary Army. Shortly after this, Britain began decommissioning and shipping over obsolete military equipment they had no more use for, among them wheeled anti-tank gun emplacements, old vehicles, and thousands of Vickers Machine Guns. The Vickers Machine Gun was originally introduced in 1912. Used in the trenches of WWI, the Vickers would remain in service for years after that, but was eventually supplanted by lighter air cooled designs. When the Civil War broke out, a decision was made. Officially decommissioning the Vickers, Britain sold their entire inventory of water cooled machine guns, along with massive caches of .303 ammunition and stockpiles of replacement barrels, to the Blue Chinese. Once the Nationalists received the machine guns, they quickly put them to use. Mounting the machine guns on wheeled gun mounts in fours, the Vickers was hastily pressed into service. In the first weeks of its deployment, the Vickers machine guns cut down untold numbers of Red Guard and destroyed dozens of aircraft. Wheeled into position, a single Vickers could keep advancing infantry hordes at bay for hours. In conjunction with the 17 pound guns, the Blue Chinese used these guns to halt several Red Chinese advances. Despite many of the guns being more than forty years old, the machine guns still worked fine, a testament to their reliability. In the earlier years of the Civil War, when Blue Chinese tactics were still more fluid, Vickers machine guns were still moved around a lot, to defend location after location. But the as the war dragged on, the Blue Chinese's tactics increasingly became static, and their posture increasingly defensive. Soon, it was clear that there simply weren't enough Vickers to defend against the onslaught of Red Chinese troops. To this end, the Blue Chinese began the production of new Vickers machine guns, decades after they had been phased out with the British. Though a stripped down version of the originals and slightly inferior in quality, being more prone to breakdowns, they worked just fine, and the Blue Chinese simply couldn't get enough of them. Entire cities were pressed into the production of more Vickers, every scrap of usable material used to make another machine gun. Salvaged from Battlemaster tanks, from destroyed machine guns, destroyed Mastiffs, households--it didn't matter. All that mattered was that the factories produced more. Vickers machine guns were soon being churned out in the thousands a week, with Vickers machine guns being used to defend everything, ringing cities, fortifications, towns and battlegrounds. With so many Vickers machine guns, it soon became unnecessary to reposition them to defend other locations, indeed, there was no need to move them at all, and the emplacements were dug in further, fortified further, strengthened further, to ensure the Communists would never break through. As static as the Vickers themselves were the men -- or rather, former men -- who operated them. Even as their crews died in droves, from fatigue to starvation to bullets to infection--just as surely did the necroscientists of the Blue Chinese make them rise again. Electrodes, implants, prosthetics... all manner of methods were used to get the dead and crippled men back up onto their feet and behind the trigger again. Transformed by the unholy science of the Blue Chinese, these men -- no longer truly men -- became more and more mere mindless drones, dedicated entirely to the efficient operation of a machine gun and the efficient killing of men, as mechanical as the devices they operated themselves. After the Bombs If today's post-apocalyptic China has one thing it does not lack for, that would be machine guns. Even though thousands of Vickers were utterly destroyed by the all consuming fire of the atomic bombs, just as many -- if not more -- survived them. In the aftermath of the bombs, thousands upon thousands of machine guns and endless quantities of ammunition simply lay ripe for the taking. The possessive bunker warlords took them, used them to protect their little fiefdoms from other warlords, bandits, and any other manner of horrors that lurk the radioactive plains of China. Even a single battlefield has enough Vickers to ring half a dozen bunker complexes, though, far more than anyone would need. The operators of these guns have also survived. The extensive modifications have made many of these former men immune to the harshness of the wasteland. They are unaffected by the radiation and poison that has scoured the land. Bullets and shrapnel alike bounce of their extensively modified bodies, and their non-existent nerves cannot feel them anyway, nor do they care for any sort of harm. Their physical endurance far exceeds that of any ordinary man; they need next to no food, water, rest or human company--in short, none of the things that a normal man would consider necessary for his continued existence. They would be the perfect soldiers, if not for the fact that they were effectively mindless, brainwashed into their tasks. They serve only one purpose -- to operate the machine guns, and they are virtually incapable of anything else. And when the first recovery crews came to recover the Vickers guns, these no longer-men were still there, still manning their guns against an enemy long vaporised into radioactive dust. After the initial shock of meeting them, many of the warlords took them along with the machine guns. It could not be any other way, in any case, for the operators refused to leave the sides of their guns. It worked to the warlords' benefit. The operators, while no longer human, were efficient, soulless, effective killing machines, able to seamlessly move their aim from one target to the next. They were the perfect operators for the machine guns in all aspects. In today's atomic wasteland, bunker complexes surrounded by walls -- literal, solid wall -- of fused together Vickers machine guns are a common sight. Firmly entrenched in the ground and welded together by any means available, they provide a means of defence from attack--and a means of retaliation against attackers who are foolish enough to come into firing range. Though there certainly aren't enough men to crew all of the machine guns, fire could sprout from any one section's barrels at any time, deterring interlopers. The machine guns are not as static as they were during the last days of the civil war, though; in the petty conflicts between the many forces that vye for power in the wastelands, machine guns are often detached from their walls to provide support in these conflicts, along with operators to man them. Category:Units